The Lake Shore Limited

By Sue Miller

Reading Sue Miller is like watching an invisible painter create a lovely, affecting work in smooth, expert strokes. Hovering close to her characters' smallest musings, Miller yet manages a pace both crisp and capacious. Characters pause to reflect. They take walks, stop for a coffee or a beer to think things through. Seasonal weather (Vermont and Boston) saturates their experience, as do sensual comforts of food, drink, sex. Facing down however much complex loss or sorrow, Miller's work nonetheless makes a reader feel cosseted inside a soothing dream.

In "The Lake Shore Limited," Miller's ninth novel, four characters narrate by turns. Leslie, nestled in a Vermont village, childless in late middle age, married to an even-tempered doctor, is the older sister of Gus, a guileless, handsome young teacher who died six years before on one of the doomed airplanes of Sept. 11, 2001. Loss of her brother, together with inability to conceive a child, have made Leslie risk-averse yet longing for "a sense of possibility. ... She thought everyone needed it" - even religious believers of the terrorist kind: "One hundred virgins waiting for you."

Gus had a girlfriend, the playwright Billy (short for Wilhelmina), the ensemble's most interesting character and Miller's central spokeswoman. Packed with conflicting urges, the articulate, embattled Billy works it out through her art and in the usual ways: exercise, drink, sex, knocking around in attentive bewilderment. Billy has a painful secret concerning Gus. Loss of him, while horrible, has thrown her into a tailspin for a different reason, awash in feelings of guilt and fraud. People mistake her anguish for "pure" grief. How is she to live with this?

Leslie and her husband attend Billy's resulting play, "The Lake Shore Limited," which describes a man's conflicted response to the fact that the wife from whom he's estranged was aboard a train bombed by terrorists. Fascinatingly, Miller seats us in the theater audience alongside her characters and unfurls the entire play. It works, giving flavorful insight from myriad perspectives. (Miller thanks director Joy Carlin, of Berkeley's Aurora Theatre, in her acknowledgments.)

Leslie tries to set Billy up with Sam, a tall, affable architect (I can never quite suppress a mixture of envy and annoyance toward the serene financial security of these players), the widowed and divorced father who once desired Leslie. Sam will have a turn narrating, as will Billy. So will Rafe, the play's male lead, who struggles with his wife's deterioration from Lou Gehrig's disease. Connections - sexual and other - reconfigure, not quite predictably.

Throughout, Miller mulls a host of artistic concerns: cannibalizing life for material ("Was it fair? The use she made of everything?"); watching the evolution of one's work (As her "anger dwindled ... her plays became less eccentric"); and the desperate need for time, space, and the beloved's comprehension. "Oh, he admired the plays ... [b]ut he didn't seem to make the connection between them and her need to be alone at her desk for four or five hours a day."

In Miller's shrewd vision, people don't always play nicely - but the worst turmoil occurs within. Her signature gift is to lay out intricate, discomfiting truths in graceful, clear sentences that never fail to engross and comfort. Here is Leslie's perception of husband Pierce, a pediatric oncologist:

"[T]o think of the way he was sometimes emptied, silenced for days after a patient's death. ... She'd seen him then as wise, as deep. She'd had a sense of his having a greater understanding of death, of the price of love, particularly parental love. ... But he was also only Pierce ... dismissive, flippant - as well as the person who understood how pain can change you. The surprise of this two-sidedness ... had the power to wound her."

The astute New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani has noted, of Miller's oeuvre, that Miller "suggests that people have a primal need to ... figure out who they really feel themselves to be and why they've made the choices that they have." Richly layered, these self-examinations drive "The Lake Shore Limited" to a subtle, piquant, satisfying closing. What seems oddly striking is the hushed quality all that interiority lends a drama generated, this time, by the external noise and chaos of an unforgettable September day.